Op Art, Stone, Abstracts

A Variety Of Visuals Draws Crowds To Boca Raton's Gallery Center.

January 21, 1996|By ROGER HURLBURT Art Writer

The visual-arts season in Palm Beach County is in full swing, as evidenced by the crush of visitors to an opening earlier this month at Boca Raton's Gallery Center. Shows at the eight-gallery complex at 608 Banyan Trail continue through Feb. 3.

-- Biggest name is Richard Anuskiewicz. The renowned American artist displaying at Gallery Camino Real (1-407-241-1606) is a leading exponent of Op Art, the use of color and geometry to produce optical sensations. His painted constructions on aluminum and wood or silk-screen ensembles against Masonite saturate the eye with quavering illusions of hues in motion.

"What can I use for color?" Anuskiewcz says. Sometimes, as the Camino showcase deftly reveals, bright colors change markedly in mood against the brown tonality of the unadulterated Masonite background. Others convert the gleam of aluminum to matte silver or a dulled gray, depending upon the color juxtaposed.

In the rear galleries are small, energetic sculptures in steel or bronze by Joel Gaesser and impeccable mixed-media tableaux encased in paper by Florida Atlantic University professor Robert Watson.

-- Jaffe Baker Gallery (1-407-241-3050) features the stacked-stone sculptures of Boaz Vaadia, who strives to put natural material back into the urban environment.

"How my works are quarried is essential, just as important as the natural strata of the pieces," Vaadia says.

Vaadia's pieces are in the same bluestone and slate used to make street curbs. He carefully slices away the larger slabs, chips the edges as though fashioning a flint arrowhead, and then piles elements of diminishing or increasing scale like pancakes into a figure. Industrial adhesives and internal metal support rods anchor the elements.

-- Freites-Revilla Gallery (1-407-241-1995) features a lively one-man show by Matt Carone, known to Broward County art devotees as entrepreneur of Carone Gallery off Las Olas Boulevard. No mere closet painter, Carone has harnessed a profound understanding of abstract expressionism to produce dreamy, semi-figurative, overtly erotic motifs in swift ("subconsciously inspired," Carone says) strokes of pigment.

The working method for the writhing acrylics on canvas and wood begins with slashing drawing in paints and charcoal, then a brusque eradication of some shapes with white pigments to conjure up ghostly images. Some strong, provocative pieces here.

-- Extremely subtle - downright minimalistic - are the offerings at on-the-edge Lipworth International Arts (1-407-241-6688). It is difficult to enthuse over Robert Ryman's bland enamel on boxboard abstraction titled Area, but a dry 1990 Agnes Martin canvas, Untitled, is effective. And check out Sol Lewitt's incisive Vertical Brushstrokes, a gouache (opaque watercolor) on paper, and an unusually small Morris Louis work, Number 3-108, from 1962. The late Louis is remembered as a master of staining canvas with vivid color.

-- Outrageously ornamental yet splendidly composed are the mixed-media pictures by Nancy Scheinman at Coplan Gallery (1-407-994-9151). She employs an arsenal of ingredients - paints, collage, graphics and fanciful whatnots - to form images that brim with figures, feathery landscapes and dancing details that resound like illuminations from a monumental manuscript. Decorative references from Henri Matisse's Moroccan phase of the 1920s are discernible. -- Indigo Galleries (1-407-998-2370) has recent watercolors by George Dombeck, a talented realist with a penchant for the whimsical. One batch of pictures depicts clusters of meticulously rendered beach stones; others possess a busy, linear elegance - rustic, twig-framed bicycles suspended in trees. Whether alluding to rock or bark, Dombeck's technique is refined and textural, even though repetition of subjects is far less satisfying than the painter's obvious abilities.

-- "Submerged Archaeology" is the title of a suite of watercolors and oils by Elizabeth Thompson at Cesarea Gallery (1-407-995-0985). Too much blue is on hand to truly "see" these diaphanous undersea visions in a gallery setting, but they are novel in spirit. The triptych Lyon from 1995 would play better if displayed on its own.

-- As always, Habatat Gallery (1-407-241-4544) is the preeminent depot in South Florida for the very best in fine-art glass creations. Headlining through January is fine craftsman Pavel Hlava, plus a stable of others.